Bob LaMonte in his home office with a piece of art that hangs there. / Marilyn Newton/RGJ

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When he tells his story, the word 'blessed' comes up regularly, and there's often a look of awe on his nearly 65-year-old face, as if he still can't believe he is where he is.

And just where is that?

In his home in southwest Reno, his backyard overlooking a sagebrush-covered canyon and his basement wine cellar sufficiently stocked. It's his home and his office. Maybe that should be, it's his office and his home. Four of the five bedrooms have been converted into offices to support his burgeoning business.

It's a strange place for one of the most powerful players in the National Football League.

LaMonte owns Professional Sports Representation Inc. with his wife Lynn, and is an agent primarily to NFL managers and coaches.

'I know people listen to him,' said Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid, one of LaMonte's clients. 'I don't know how powerful any of us are, but he has a lot of head coaches and general managers, and people listen to him. I always call him the assistant commissioner because he has so many different categories as far as (clients).'

Michael Lombardi of the National Football Post recently named LaMonte the NFL Man of the Year.

'At the end of each year, Time magazine always has a cover with its Person of the Year, someone who has made an impact in the current year or is likely to influence the next year,' Lombardi wrote on Dec. 31. '... we'd like to offer our version of the Man of the Year, a person who, in the next several weeks/months, will quietly control the league landscape but will not be recognized by fans for his importance or the power he wields.'

LaMonte is perhaps the most unique sports agent in the United States. He has a few athletes -- most notably St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Chris Carpenter (LaMonte wears a 2006 World Series ring, a gift from Carpenter, on his right ring finger) -- but the focus of his business is NFL coaches, coordinators, general managers and other executives. His clients are some of the biggest names in the league: head coaches Reid, Brad Childress (Minnesota Vikings), John Fox (Carolina Panthers) and Mike Singletary (San Francisco 49ers) and Cleveland Browns president Mike Holmgren.

'(It was) an area that wasn't represented when we went into it,' said LaMonte, who played football at Santa Clara and started out as a U.S. history teacher and football coach at San Jose's Oak Grove High. '... The average salary in 1988 for a head coach was $300,000. Now it's $3.5 million. So, we went into something that was void of representation and made it significant.'

The LaMontes started PSR in 1979, and in the last decade the business has taken off. In 2000, PSR had 18 clients. Now there are 45. All but five are involved in pro football.

'He's a trustworthy guy,' Reid said. 'He looks out for the best interest of the NFL and his (clients). He keeps that well balanced, and he's a great negotiator. He's fair. I don't think people mind doing deals with him.

'I owe a lot to him. He believed in me when maybe some people didn't. ... He has a unique knack of seeing the talents of people and making it even a little bit better and more marketable.'

The best PSR year was 2009, with more than $29 million in negotiated contracts, highlighted by the Reid contract extension and the deal LaMonte worked out for Holmgren, who took over the Browns on Dec. 21. Those deals helped push PSR to more than $900 million in negotiated contracts.

LaMonte said he doesn't like to throw that number around. The money is nice -- the LaMontes, who are parents of four grown children, maintain a home in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and an apartment in New York City, and their Reno home is impeccably furnished. But it's not PSR's focus. '

'I don't really like to publish that,' he said. 'But people always want to know.

As a young man, LaMonte was more than happy to be a history teacher, football coach, husband and father.

Rich Campbell, a quarterback at Santa Teresa High which shared the Oak Grove campus in the mid-'70s, had asked LaMonte for assistance as he mulled college offers. LaMonte helped guide him to California-Berkeley, where he had a stellar career. Campbell went back to LaMonte in 1979 and asked him to be his agent.

At about the same time, one of LaMonte's fellow coaches at Oak Grove invited LaMonte to lunch and told him he was considering a move to San Francisco State to be an assistant coach. He wanted LaMonte's advice.

'He said, 'Do you think I could ever become a college head coach?'' LaMonte recalled. 'I told him, 'You have to do it because you're brilliant at what you do'.'

That coach was Holmgren.

'I asked Mike, 'Do you think I could be a sports agent?'' LaMonte said. 'He said, 'I think you'd be great. You're honest, intelligent enough. You played the game. Why couldn't you be?''

LaMonte says he was blessed to have Campbell 'fall into his lap' -- Campbell went to the Green Bay Packers with the sixth draft pick in 1981 -- and the friendship and guidance of Holmgren, whom he would begin to represent when Holmgren went to San Francisco State in 1981. He called them two of the three watershed moments in his professional life.

The third was Dave Stieb, a pitcher at Oak Grove who also asked LaMonte to be his agent. Stieb had a 16-year Major League career, mostly with the Toronto Blue Jays. Stieb, who lives in Reno, is considered by some to be the greatest pitcher in Blue Jays history.

'If you're panning for gold, those are three great nuggets,' LaMonte said. 'All we had to do was make sure we didn't mess it up.'

LaMonte is equally flabbergasted by how fate guided his career path. He continued to teach at the high school and junior college level until 1993, a 14-year overlap with his time as an agent. He is a financial planner, a stock broker, a real-estate broker and an insurance broker. He's a distinguished lecturer at New York University.

'Diplomacy, to me, is the art of everything it is that I do,' said LaMonte, who as a diplomat studied abroad and lived in Russia. 'And if I had not had that kind of a background I would have never, ever become an agent. I could have never picked a better background.'

The PSR model

LaMonte said he has plenty of help at PSR, beginning with his wife.

'Lynn runs the company,' he said. 'She's the glue of PSR.'

Lynn LaMonte is unique among agents' wives. Like her husband, she is a financial planner, and she works regularly with the client and the client's wife to plan for the future.

'There are a lot of people like me that do this business,' Bob LaMonte said. 'There's no one like Lynn. No company in America has a Lynn LaMonte that interfaces one-on-one with the women involved in the other side of the game. That's what makes her value immeasurable.

'If I call Mike Holmgren or Chris Carpenter, they'll probably get back to me in a day or two if they're busy. If Lynn LaMonte calls them, they get back in 10 minutes. She manages them. She's the one that does the financials for them.'

Two of the offices at the LaMonte home are occupied by office manager Misti Martin and Carole Terrell, the information technology specialist. A third room, a basement addition referred to as 'the war room,' is about 30 feet long, 5 feet wide and houses the computer brains of the operation and about 150 3-inch, three-ring binders, each assigned to a client.

Another key person is Bob Armstrong of the high-powered Reno law firm McDonald, Carano, Wilson. One other unique thing about Bob LaMonte: Unlike nearly every agent, he doesn't have a law degree.

'Bob Armstrong does all our legal work,' Bob LaMonte said. 'He's done every contract. Without him, this would not be possible. We couldn't function without him.'

LaMonte, who said billion-dollar companies have tried to buy PSR, said his is a 100 percent referral business, another exception to the rule in sports agency.

'A lot of companies have 'A' clients, 'B' clients and 'C' clients,' he said. 'We have only 'A' clients. We're able to do that because if you are a referral company, you're not promising anything. They're coming to you for help, and that makes it a much better relationship.'

'The model is we like them young,' he said. 'We like to sign people between 35 and 45 as assistant GMs or coordinators and bring them out as GMs and head coaches between 40 and 50.'

He said he never accepts referrals who are older than the model, but occasionally referrals who are younger. A case in point is Denver Broncos coach Josh McDaniels, who was 33 when he signed with LaMonte.

'They have to have 'it,'' said LaMonte, who authored 'Winning the NFL Way: Leadership Lessons from Football's Top Head Coaches.' ''It' is that ability to make everyone around you better, from the lowest person in the company to the highest.'

Down time

If the Minnesota Vikings had reached the Super Bowl -- they lost Jan. 24 to the New Orleans Saints in the NFC Championship -- LaMonte would be in Miami this week, assisting Childress.

The only clients he has in Sunday's Super Bowl are Indianapolis Colts GM Chris Polian and Saints assistant head coach Joe Vitt. Neither needs his attention, so LaMonte is in the middle of a rare two-week stretch in Reno.

'This is the first time I've been here for two weeks in a row since I can't even tell you how long,' he said.

It's the reason he's in Reno in the first place. The LaMontes moved to Incline Village from San Jose in the 1990s, but access to an airport wasn't easy, so they moved down the hill.

'Reno has been phenomenal for that,' Bob LaMonte said. 'It's the best place in America to live and work if you fly a lot because of the proximity of the airport.'

And the LaMontes ought to know. Bob said he and Lynn each do about 120,000 air miles a year.

'Our real office is American Airlines, seats 4A and 4B,' he said with a chuckle. 'Lynn's in 4A. I'm in 4B. It's really sad.'